J Walking Through the Alphabet: The Selected Works of Julie Ezelle Patton - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A much-anticipated collection of poet and visionary artist Julie Patton's experiments with text and image.

It's here! The first ever collection of legendary poet and performer Julie Patton's collected works. Patton, who came into her own as a multidisciplinary artist between the late 70's-90's in New York's East Village describes herself as a self-fashioned old skool political spiritualist, non-consumerist, and principled jester. Over the decades, she has been known as a performance and installation artist, incorporating written, visual, and sound elements often composed in the moment. Her work has appeared in small publications but has long been elusive. Now, this fantastic selection of Patton's pioneering experimental work with texts, books, phonemes, and nature invites readers to bask in her mercurial spirit as she welcomes us into her prismatic, interdimensional digs.

Review Quotes

"A poetic praxis that resists reification as art under glass, framed and hung steadfast. . . She instead embraces the improvised, the transient, the aural, the dialogic, the infinite occasions of specific places and times." --Jennifer Scappetone

"Patton's poetry and intertwined performative practices engage in a continual act of unfolding--of deep and irreverent play." --Lee Ann Brown

About the Author

Once introduced by Harryette Mullen as "Truly Unruly Julie," Julie Ezelle Patton is the author of Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (2007), "Car Tune" & Not So Bella Donna (2003). A 2024 special issue of Chicago Review was devoted to their poetic, performative, and visual work and building maintenance project. Patton's work has been published in About Place Journal and the anthologies nocturnes, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994), Eco Language Reader (2010), and Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (2024). Patton also creates in-the-moment compositions with a typewriter and nonconventional instruments, and has performed at Arts for Art, the Stone, Artists Space, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and other noted venues. An award-winning educator, Patton has taught her unique forms of "poethics" at New York University, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and Schule für Dichtung in Vienna, as well as in New York City schools and her own backyard, wherever that is. For Patton, this bio's ideal form would be a picture of a circle.